from May 2007
Arab men are now one of the hottest niches in gay porn.
The niche is not exactly new; it is the Arab nature of it — primarily those young Arabs who have flocked to Europe for work — that gives it a new face.
Visual Aids? Above are several scenes from Arab Men (Part I), one of the most popular titles in this category; at right the porn star Huessein, who through his adopted porn name and porn bio promotes his Turkish ancestry and who set off a comments war in these pages when we dared to describe him — and please don’t start up again — as “a beautiful ugly man.”
But the niche itself — well, it’s a classic archetype of the erotic imagination.
The Great Dark Man, Quentin Crisp used to call this eternal figure. Not exactly dreamboats, but dream brutes.
The Great Dark Man, while never fully detailed in Crisp’s brightly-lit epigrammatic prose, could be readily inferred from the writer’s autobiography The Naked Civil Servant.
The politically correct reader is certain to disagree with me, but it seems clear that our fey, outré Quentin had a rather Jane Eyre-ish sense of himself — as a lowly, compliant substitute female — whom this Great Dark Man would set off, as black velvet sets off pale but completely artificial pearls.
In Quentin’s view, the homosexual man, being unnatural, did not have the right to resist. This was, of course, a complete sex-fetish rape fantasy — one coming out of a Victorian sense of black/white gender roles.
The Great Dark Man, then, was a hot dark fuck who would use the will-less Quentin and abuse him and then, after he had punished every orifice, leave him in a puddle of goo — only to return again next month when, say, the Man’s wife might be on the rag.
I think we all recognize in Quentin’s Great Dark Man the uncensored bottom’s dream of “the real man” — a fantasy not quite out of date or through with us yet, despite its embarrassing and masochistic origins in the hash, scornful atmosphere of the high school locker room.
Arab men, due to the puritanical nature of their culture, are ripe to play this macho role now. The greater the repression, the hotter the sex — one of the eternal verities of homosexual life.
Certainly when we observe Arab culture, we see all the sex-repressive signs of a patriarchal theocracy: the serious penalties for unmarried sex, the chattel nature of the woman whose chastity is seen as a property issue, belonging first to her father and brothers and then later, like a real-estate deed, transfered to the custody of her husband and sons.
With such sex-phobic prohibitions against women, no wonder there is such widespread male coupling with teenage boys — the sort of uncommitted, passionless sex typical of prisons, where the men are merely horny and settle for whatever’s handy.
But then commitment has never been essential to hot sex. Having sex with someone you don’t love is as invigorating as loving someone you don’t have sex with. Despite the relentless hetero propaganda to the contrary, sex doesn’t need any additives, like love or marriage, to be totally satisfying.
And certainly the Great Dark Man — the horny, disinterested fuck machine — is, for many of us, like catnip. All that pent up repression creates a kind of sexual fury in the otherwise straight partner, a charged atmosphere of furtive sin, which most of us can only take seriously during the heated playtime between tumescence and orgasm.
And so, not surprisingly, the Arab sex footage is super hot and super popular. And before the comments pour in, this is not an observation based on race or skin color — though the mocha bods of the sleek Moroccan boys do have their special charms. This is about the pugilistic aura of sex that surrounds all puritan men, be they from Algiers or the skinhead Christian Identity camps of Appalachia. Due not to the color of their skin or the name of their sacred text, but to the pressure that builds when a natural force is damed up by a wall of inflexible dogma.
To clinch out case — the greater the repression, the hotter the sex — we offer you Exhibits A, B, C and D in this mad little video from someone named Azis, who appears to be a drag-queen pop star in — and this blows our mind too — Bulgaria.
The exhibits are all in various stages of muscleman undress and each one, we are told, represents some Great Dark Byzantine Man who has left Azis to go back to his wife. The song, much to our delight, is part lament, and part sweaty, rippling porn. Take it away, Azis!
So rejoice, pilgrim. If we must have sexual repression in our best of all possible worlds, even repression can have its own, very disturbing, silver lining.
Great article. The greater the repression, the hotter the(gay) sex. So true.
Such awesome writing on such bizarrely fascinating topics! This site amazes me again and again.
I was raised “American” although I am half Yugoslavian (ipso facto, muslim) via my Dad. He played that style of music constantly when I was younger and fighting my way out of the closet. It blows my mind to now hear it being sung by a middle eastern drag queen behind these beefed up Arab porn dudes in Village People outfits! Crazy!
Welcome to the post 9/11 world, right?
Mmm, get me a ticket to Bulgaria! The extra beefy dudes in the video are definitely Quentin’s type.
His dream date, stated many times, was Raymond Burr, but I doubt if he ever got to fulfill it as Burr was known in Tinseltown as Mr. Under-the-Glass-Coffee-Table.
Apparently my reading of Quentin Crisp is not so radical, after all. One of my French-Canadian correspondents, Yvan, reminds me of this quote from the pen of Q. C.:
“The problem that confronts homosexuals is that they set out to win the love of a ‘real’ man. If they succeed, they fail. A man who ‘goes with’ another man is not what they would call a ‘real man’”
Crisp called it like he saw it and — more importantly — lived it. His view of gender roles, though, is as strict and antediluvian as James Dobson’s. There is the vague whiff of religion and sin around these notions of what is “real” — that is, natural and spontaneous — and what is not.
Today we see this same hero-worshiping of “real men” marketed in so-called “straight guy” gay porn. Like I say in the above piece, I find something embarrassing about this but nevertheless factual.
There is a notion that straight men are “realer” than gay men but what the basis for that realness might be — are they more virile, risk-taking, nasty? — doesn’t really stand up to sober scrutiny.
In my experience, gay men playacting in a leather bar at being gruff bikers and musclemen do a better job of it than the straight versions you find in real life. Plenty of hot gay men out there to give the Quentin in all of us that butch experience — with the important add-on, that these men will actually feel passion about you, will actually revel and lose themselves in the fucking.
Isn’t that the “realness” that is actually longed for?
Arabian MEN= X-Tremely HOT!
…love them
JUST AN INCIDENTAL OBSERVATION: YOUR ARTICLE “HOT ARABS: IN PURSUIT ….. MAKES A REFERENCE BY INCLUSION TO “BYZANTINE” MEN. THE BYZANTINES WERE NOT ARABS, THEY WERE EUROPEAN GREEK CHRISTIANS AND UNFORTUNATELY AND HISTORICALLY BORE THE HOSTILITY OF INSECURE TURKISH AND ARAB MUSLIMS, EVEN IN TODAY’S QUAGMIRE.
LAST COMMENT WAS FROM A RACIST HATER. GROW UP, YOUR TYPE OF THINKING BELONGS IN NAZI GERMANY OR APARTHIED ISRAEL.
hmm… As a middle eastern, arab, woman, I don’t know if i’m flattered or offended. I am flattered because for example I do know that Arabs have hotter sex than most people because of all the social and cultural prohibitions. I’m not sure though if arab gay men feel the same way about this issue, a lot of foreigners view the middle east as a sexual paradise for gay men with a harem-like virtue, that is not true, arab gay men and women suffer a lot of discrimination and persecution that it is only inconsiderate to view them as objects of sexual desire, as for Arab-Israeli Porn - I’m totally for it, I am totally for normalizing ‘relations’
What Da Fuck is Up With the Video!?
je cherche un homme pour nick moi j attend ses reponses merci
Re: SAM 5/13/07. Sam, what ja do, flunk history or re-write; there are no “Byzantine Arabs” just like there are no feathers on frogs! “RACIST HATER”? Where’s that from, or have you (a non-Moslem gay man?)not visited an an Arab of Moslem country in the last thousand years … Sam, I think “you protest too loudly”, you’re too much of an “illusioned psychologist”, become a BEHAVIORIST like me: If it walks like a duck …… G. Arthur is right, just stating historical and current reality.
Im maltese and I think europeans are the fucking best at everything ..
I think this article is well written but I’m really on the fence about celebrating sexual repression simply because it can result in hot sex. I think that’s a really easy position to take when you sit in an area of relative comfort and freedom around your sexuality. And that’s not PC, that’s just plain fact.
I think the nature of public opinion towards the Arab/Muslim world calls for extra sensitivity when talking about them as a group. If some of the above comments could be reasonably interpreted as racist (which they certainly can), it’s enough to make them problematic.
As for this article, though, I do not consider it so problematic. It does “exhoticize” Arab men, which would be problematic if the website hadn’t also exhoticized everyone else in previous posts. But since they talk about everyone in that way I don’t have an issue with it.
To address a second, equally political issue brought up in the comments…
I don’t think sexual repression should be celebrated either, but I think we can acknowledge, or at least ponder, the liklihood that a lot of what we consider erotic is based on repression. For example, I’ve noticed that many women in the BDSM community, though they are politically “feminists,” can still be turned on by gender-derogatory terms like “bitch” and “slut.” It’s an interesting paradox to be both for and against such phrases in different contexts.
I can think of some terrifying locker room scenarios I went through when I was 13, 14, 15 years old as a teenager worried about being identified as gay and wondering what would happen to me if somoene figured it out. I can also think of some very pleasurable sexual fantasies that I had at that same age of being caught peeking at guys’ cocks or being unable to control a hard-on, then being tea-bagged or urinated on by those guys as retribution. In the fantasy they were degrading me sexually, while in reality I was afraid of them knocking out my teeth, which would not have been “hot” at all - but I think there is an inexorable link between what scared me and what I would jerk off to in the privacy of my bedroom. I don’t think I’m alone in this.
Hussein rules!
Personally, I really don’t think my attraction to Arab men has anything to do with politics. Maybe unconsciously, I associate Arab men with a certain wildness because they are from a completely different culture than my white male American one.
But primarily, I just like swarthy skin and dark hair. The darker the hair the better: anything from deep, rich walnut dark brown to a lustrous pool of blue-black silk that makes me I feel like I’m swimming in a sea of shiny ebony. Scent it with Jasmine oil or one of those other tropical Arabic scents and watch me go over the edge.
Really, anybody dark will do: from dark South American men speaking sexy Portuguese to Morocco to Egypt to Pakistan to India to Bangladesh to Indonesia. Swarthy skin and dark hair and handsome.
Call me shallow, but I’m singing the praises of these men because I like them A LOT. Now, after all this, watch me develop (tomorrow morning, say) a throbbing hard on for a guy so Nordic it’s not even funny. Here in NYC, you see all sorts and can fall into it with all sorts.
call me even more shallow, but i luv the pics of the guys fucking! yummy.
ya gotta admit that politics really got nothin’ to do with nuttin, boyz. some to sayz, sometimes i like em white, sometimes i like em dark. is that wrong?